Best Layout for Product Page SEO

[DavidLenehan]

Hi

I am looking to revamp my website and would like to know your views on the best product layout for SEO - in particular if it better to have tabulated content like play.com

http://goo.gl/4xdqp

or non tabulated content like Amazon.

http://goo.gl/cojKj

Are there any pros or cons to each approach?  I believe tabulated looks better and is easier to navigate but do the engines see this as hidden text? I have been told this is an issue with expandable divs.

Many thanks

David

[jbrabants]

@Stephen,

Seems like we have different experiences with using tabs. We used it on an ecommerce website and it improved the conversion rate. Now we're still testing other layouts but some usability tests showed us that the tabs are helping people find the information they are looking for very fast.

The templates you refer to at unbounce.com aren't product detail pages, they are lead generation or click through pages and they indeed do need a specific design to increase conversions. I do agree with what you say about testing, that's the only way to make descisions based on facts. Testing is continuous process, there are always things to be optimized.

[firstconversion]

Ofc, many experiments show that tabs are terrible for conversion. Only way you can know is to test

I suggest you have a look at eth templates on unbounce.com and have a look at 5secondtest as well.

Finish off with some google a/b and multivariate tests and you will never have to ask for opinions again; the numbers will tell you the facts

[DavidLenehan]

Thanks for clearing it up Joris & Gianluca.

[gfiorelli1]

Hi David,

I too prefer the play.com example. And no... Search Engines does not consider the content into tabs as hidden, because - if you think it - it is not hidden at all as the users can click on the tab and read the content.

If the users weren't able to access to content in the tabs, that would be hidden.

Amazon model, on the other side, is ugly to see, but somehow it is such a "visual trademark" that people do not care to scroll the page... but it is Amazon: I don't believe that a new site would have the same condiscendence.

[jbrabants]

In my opinion the layout itself doesn't impact the SEO that much, if you take the general on-page SEO rules into account (page title, url, H1, content, images, ...)

If these elements are optimized you should consider optimizing the page for a better conversion rate, and if you look at the two examples you just showed I might imagine that the layout Play uses converts better. We recently did some multivariate testing for a big e-commerce site and ended up with a similar page layout, without hurting SEO rankings. Conversion rate increased 12% to the previous layout.